by Kip S. Thorne

Non-Fiction

I'm not what you would call an intellectual and I've never studied Physics, but I found this book easily accessible and even fascinating. I decided to read it because it was cited as one of the sources for the science behind a time travel series I follow, and I wanted to try to grasp the very real science behind the fictional events in the stories.

The book basically tells the story of the rise of Cosmology and Particle Physics since the 1920s, explaining in layman's terms the leading theories, discoveries and the scientists who initiated the theories that we now accept as fact, proven through mathematical formulae where physical proof is still beyond our reach.

It effectively starts with Einstein and his alternate ideas to Newtonian Physics and works forward from there. This sounds like it could have made for dry reading, but the personalities as well as trials and political conflicts that affected the personalities involved bring the events to life on a very human level. Sometimes it's even funny, like when Professor Thorne describes an incident where he made a bet with Stephen Hawking about the existence of black holes and when sufficient proof settled the bet, Hawking, with the help of a group of students, broke into Thorne's office at Cal Tech to sign off on the bet, which was written out on a document displayed on the office wall.

The book as a whole gave me a sense of the global scientific community, which can be co-operative beyond national lines or competitive on a more personal level and even riddled with as much ego as the acting world at times. It explains the process for acceptance of new ideas within that community, which I had no idea of before.

I found the book as interesting as many spy stories, and have only given it 4 stars instead of 5 because I had hoped to learn something about time loops from it, which was not really touched on despite mention in the description. It was written in an engaging style that is rare for writers on science, though the fictionalized Prologue suggests that the author had best stick to non-fiction.

I enjoyed the read, and I now know a lot more about the subject matter than I did before I read it. Whether I read more on the subject is yet to be seen.

This book is extremely intriguing and worth your time. 

* 5 books that didn't seem to fit onto any other list, and

* 3 addenda which will also go, retroactively, onto the "first hand accounts", "women's history" and "literary and cultural history" lists.

THE STRAGGLERS

* David P. Silverman: Ancient Egypt
* Linda Schele & David A. Freidel: A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya

* Stefan Zweig: Joseph Fouché
* David Graeber: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
* Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time

THE ADDENDA

* Helen Keller: The Story of My Life
* Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago

* Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

This is a great read, despite some minor repetitions. We have to bear in mind that this is really only a series of essays, some of which cover a little of the same ground. My view is that if Hawking had lived a little longer then this would have been a better compiled set of ‘letters on the big questions’, but that doesn’t much detract from the quality of the work, and certainly not from its messages. These essays run a lot wider than science, into Hawking’s hopes and fears for humankind. Some of the essays run into sensitive issues, which raise a good deal of honest debate. Well, there are just too many of us on our wonderful planet, which we are rapidly destroying, and this alone must justify our questioning of everything, even the very existence of God.

There are a few contradictions in the science, which isn’t surprising when writing about an incredibly quickly advancing field of science, cosmology, and especially when the material was compiled from words written over some spread of time. Inevitably the gravitas, the gravity of Hawking’s thoughts are also less than perfectly modulated. I was only too pleased to read every single word despite my minor criticisms.

I must add though that for me the finest words in this book were actually penned by his daughter, Lucy, in the Afterword. I quote from the many pearls among them. “I think he would have been very proud of this book.” This collection tells us a little about Hawking as a political animal, being in part autobiographical, and given yet greater insight into the man by the biography content of the other contributors. We have had a ‘Brief History of Time’, which is now augmented by this brief and personal feeling encounter with the brave genius in the electrically powered chair. Alas, the book is all too brief, and doomed now to a steady state of content, unlike our dynamic and cosmically unstable universe.

AMAZON LINK